


No Worst, There Is None

by emotionaldalek



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Depression, Drama, Gen, No Character Death, Suicide, Tragedy, incarceration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-16
Updated: 2013-08-16
Packaged: 2017-12-23 17:22:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/929120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emotionaldalek/pseuds/emotionaldalek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will is having suicidal thoughts while imprisoned in the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Based on the poem of the same name by Gerard Manley Hopkins.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Worst, There Is None

'My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief-  
woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing -  
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked "No ling-  
erring! Let me be fell; force I must be brief".'  
\- 'No Worst, There Is None,' by Gerard Manley Hopkins

He'd been in here a month now. A month of being confined to this tiny little cell. A month of people believing him a murderer. A month of having Chilton poking around inside of his head.

Sometimes he got visitors, but mostly it was just Hannibal. Will suspected the man to be gloating. Jack came once, and had seemed upset, and couldn't stop saying that he was sorry for letting him get too close. Alana came a few times, but mostly she just tried to hold back tears while updating him on his dogs, both of them pondering the what-ifs and might-have-beens. It's a brief distraction, though; a respite. Freddie Lounds got in once; Will suspected that she'd bribed Chilton.

There is no respite from the guilt over the murders that he does not honestly know if he committed or not. Every time he closes his eyes, he sees his would-be victims, one at a time, in the order of their deaths. Abigail, of course, is the worst. He sees her, covered in blood, her left ear missing, and she talks. She's the only one that talks. She asks him why he killed her, and he tries to say that he didn't, but he's not sure; he might well have killed her, and very possible eaten her.

That's generally when Will wakes up, drenched in sweat, breathing heavily. At first, the orderly on duty would check on him, but now they're used to it, and just wait for him to go back to sleep while making notes saying that he's having nightmares.

Will begins to think that the only way out of this is death. He knows that he will feel guilty about these deaths until the day he dies, especially Abigail's death. He doesn't want to see her bloody form anymore. He doesn't want to see any of them anymore. What he wants is to go home to his dogs, to curl up, and to end it all, peacefully, by washing down a bottle of sleeping pills with his whisky and just not waking up the next morning.

He thinks that if he were undergoing physical torture, with some of the contraptions used in the middle ages, the physical pain would pale in comparison to the torture his mind is currently receiving.

He wonders should he talk to someone. Not Dr. Lecter, though. Maybe Alana? But she'd just tell him to talk to Hannibal, or Chilton. He can't talk to them, but he's going to have to risk taking to Alana.

She comes to visit the next morning - she visits every Thursday morning at ten. They start with small talk; he asks what the weather's like, what major news he's missed, that kind of thing. She updates him on his dogs. Winston had to go to the vet yesterday - ear mites - but other than that, there's no news.

And then he starts to tell her. He tells her how he wants to be dead, so that he can escape his guilt and the hallucinations and dreams it has manifested itself into. He tells her how he's no longer sure about everything he did our did not do before his incarceration being real or not. He tells her about his desire to go home, and what he wants to do there. He tells her about how her visits are the only break he gets from the torture of his mind.

And she listens. She listens and holds back the tears for her friend. She listens and tries to ignore the fact that she cannot hug her best friend, even though he needs it so much. She listens despite how much it breaks her heart to hear it.

What does she say? She won't lie to him and tell him that it'll all be okay; he's been charged with multiple counts of murder and deemed unfit to stand trial due to poor mental state. He's unlikely to ever see the light of day again. All she can come up with is a pathetic 'oh, Will,' and pressing her hand against the glass exactly where his own is on the other side, as though that's going to help.

He feels mildly better for having told her. It's the closest he can come to sharing his burden.

Alana bursts into tears in her car outside. She's told the staff that they need to put Will on suicide watch.

That night, Alana's weeping form joins the deluge, asking him why he killed those people, saying that they could have been happy. He wakes up and cries himself that night. He feels worse than ever now.

Hannibal visits him the next morning, mock concern on his face. Will doubts that he actually cares what happens to him; Dr. Lecter has got his scape goat now. The doctor asks him questions, but not one does he reply to; not for him. For him he sits in the corner of his cell, staring at the blurred ground at his feet (they won't let him have his glasses) as though it's a lost da Vinci. By the time Hannibal finally leaves, Will probably knows the patch of floor like the back of his hand.

As time goes by, Will retreats into himself more and more, until after six months, Alana's the only person he'll say a word to. He's still suicidal. He has to listen to Chilton, every day, telling him that he killed those people. He almost believes it now, and he's not sure he can live with that.

Then, one day, Hannibal, on one of his now rather infrequent visits, leaves behind a pencil case. Years later, no one will be able to say for sure whether or not it was on purpose. Will searches the thing, rifling through it until he finds what he's looking for. At last, he finds it; a scalpel, used by Lecter to sharpen pencils.

An orderly, by chance, walks past the cell moments later, just in time to see Will draw the scalpel across his own throat. By some luck, he misses his jugular, and he's saved thanks to the quick work of the infirmiry staff.

Will wakes up nearly six weeks later in ICU in Johns Hopkins, his wrists and ankles bound to the bed, and a tube down his throat. His neck itches. Alana's shouting for a doctor, the book she'd been reading to him abandoned on the floor, the pages crumpling as Will coughs and splutters.

He's only awake for a few minutes after they take the tube out, then he falls into a deep sleep. When he wakes up again, he's alone.

He believes that this will be how the rest of his life is; lonely and pointless. How much suffering can one person take, after all?


End file.
